So the next question became, how to do this call justice? There were two required elements: a fat, female protagonist and some sort of journey to a strange land (however conceived). The fat part I had no problem with. Though I am not considered overweight myself, many members in my extended family have dealt with obesity and other weight-related issues. So my familiarity the situations they’ve faced along with my experiences with the societal pressures any woman feels, I felt reasonably confident I could create a fat character and treat her with respect.

The “strange land” part was trickier. What kind of story could I tell? It was going to be science fiction, I knew that much. Which means future. And when I think future, I honestly don’t think of fat. Because in the shiny future, we will have figured out all the nutritional and emotional and genetic triggers that make us fat and everyone will be healthy and beautiful and live forever… Well, at least I hope that’s how it goes. So the question then for me was why would people need to be fat the future? There had to be some benefit to being fat.

Fat is essentially stored energy. What if the people in my story needed an abundance of stored energy to do something? That became: what if they needed it for a mission they were going on? And of course, it had to be a mission to a “strange land.” A-ha. My character would be leading a terraforming mission to an icy, uninhabited planet, and the fat was necessary to not only keep her team warm but to also give them the energy they needed to work near constantly to keep the mission on schedule.

Large orbital mirrors that will reflect sunlight and heat the Mars surface.

Smashing ammonia-heavy asteroids into the planet to raise the greenhouse gas level.

Greenhouse gas-producing factories to trap solar radiation.

The scope of the first two methods was so overwhelming, I was uncomfortable using them. How could I keep this a story about a small team of people when they are building these massive mirrors or flinging asteroids (!) into planets? Plus the level of technical and scientific details made me nervous since I definitely don’t have a degree in astrophysics. The third one was most plausible, but I kept thinking how all three of these methods relied on introducing energy to the planet either via the sun or through asteroidal impact, not using the planet itself as a source of energy. Why not heat the planet up from the inside out instead of outside in?

We all know about the power of greenhouse gasses. But even without our meddling, the earth would still produce CFCs and other gasses that heat up the atmosphere through natural processes like volcanic eruptions. And we get volcanoes and earthquakes along fault lines where tectonic plates rub up against one another.But although this is all well and fine for Earth, what about other planets? Did they have plate tectonics?

It's very cool to see this story come to life, as it were, in this anthology. It's everything you deserve. Congratulations!

This is an interesting breakdown and useful info on how you got your story to where you got it to, all the steps that followed from a shiny future that's devoid of fat. It's good to see the amount of thinking that goes into writing - a good reminder of the work involved, that it's NOT just sitting down and writing from a mystical place (although it can be, because I don't want to discount the times that it is). Writing is work, and without the work, the writing fails.

Full disclosure: I know your story, and agree that you treated the subject, and your main character, with respect, and am really excited to see it in print. I'm also interested to see what others did with that starting point, what kind of story gets told with different starting points, different assumptions. And this, of course, is where writing gets fun - in the reading.

This is wonderful, Blue! I like seeing how other writers' thought processes work when brainstorming ideas. Congrats! You've really been doing well the past few months with your writing. That is awesome. Keep it up!